Manage timecards and overtime (W-2)

💡 Tips

• •Manager-added timecards are marked with a Manager-added badge as an audit record, and the entry is blocked if the unpaid break is longer than the shift.
• •The payroll engine works chronologically and applies your daily and weekly thresholds; the defaults (8 hours daily, 40 weekly, overtime 1.5x, double-time 2x) are just a starting point and are fully configurable per agency and per interpreter.
• •Assignments worked inside a scheduled shift are paid by the shift clock and add no extra interpreter pay; only outside-shift jobs are paid on top.
• •For a job outside the clock, which hours are paid follows your Billing time basis (Settings, Billing & Subscription, Billing Rules), the same setting that bills the customer and pays a contractor. On Scheduled, the default, someone who finishes early is still paid the booked time. This applies to jobs from October 18, 2026 on; earlier jobs keep their closed-out time so paid periods don't change.
• •Booked time is paid only when the whole job was worked off the clock, such as a call-out. If any of the job's worked time was on a punch, the job pays its worked time, so a job booked 4:30 to 6:00 that ends at 4:45, when the employee clocks out, does not pay the booked time after they went home.
• •Booked time that was not worked is paid at straight time. Each of those hours earns the premium in force during that hour, and none of it counts toward overtime or is paid as overtime. On the Scheduled basis, a court day booked 8 AM to 8 PM and worked 8 to 11 still pays 12 hours, but only 3 of them count toward the week's 40.
• •A billable late cancellation pays a W-2 employee the same way: the booked hours at straight time, each hour at its own premium, never in the overtime column, even in a week already past 40 hours.
• •Changing the two-rate overtime method also changes what an already-calculated period recalculates to, so check with your accountant before switching part way through a quarter.
• •The minimum billed time you set for a customer is a billing rule, not a pay rule. A job that simply runs a little past a punch no longer adds a cushion of paid time on top, so payroll totals for those weeks are slightly lower than they used to be. The minimum still applies to a job that falls entirely outside the clock. On-call hours from a flat charge are different: they are paid on top of the punch whenever more than 15 minutes of the on-call window is off the clock (see Flat charges).
• •The "Worked (week to date)" and "Projected (week)" columns both cover the whole week, not the single day you are looking at.
• •With rounding on, the timecard shows the rounded time with "clocked" and the real time underneath. The real clock-in is always kept. Payroll, the overtime tracker and PTO accrual use the rounded time. Rounding is not available while regular hours come from the Staff schedule.
• •With the automatic lunch on, the timecard and the employee's own history show the lunch as "scheduled unpaid lunch (automatic)". The punch itself is never changed; payroll and the overtime tracker count the hours with the lunch taken off. It is not needed while regular hours come from the Staff schedule, which already takes the lunch off.
• •A live "hours toward OT" tracker shows each employee's progress toward the week's overtime threshold, on their interpreter card, in the timecards table, and on the staff schedules summary, and the dispatch board warns you before an assignment would push someone into overtime.
• •The tracker's week label shows weekdays (for example "Sun Nov 1 – Sat Nov 7"), so you can see which day your workweek starts on. When jobs outside someone's shift add hours, each one is listed by name, for example "Out of shift: Sun 11/1, 2:00–3:30 PM · Riverside Clinic · 1.5h". A job that was partly on the clock reads like "0.2h of 7.4h outside the shift", and one still to come is marked "(upcoming)".
• •With the automatic lunch on, the tracker takes the lunch off a shift that is still clocked in, so today's hours don't read 30 minutes high until the person clocks out.
• •An unpaid break comes out of the middle of the scheduled shift (or the middle of the punch on a day with no scheduled shift). It is not spread across the day, so an evening hour at a night premium is paid as a full hour. Total hours paid are the same either way.
• •Approved leave (PTO) appears on the payroll worksheet and CSV as its own lines at the base rate; leave hours never count toward overtime.
• •Holiday premiums reach the paycheck, not just the invoice. Set which holidays your staff are paid a premium on in Staff Pay Rules, the same way you set them for billing.
• •When more than one premium covers the same hours, the worksheet names each one ("Weekend Day + July 4th") instead of saying "Combined", with its own dollar amount on its own row.
• •🔴 On those per-premium rows the hours repeat and the dollars do not. An hour that earned two premiums shows on both rows, because it genuinely earned both. Adding up the dollar column is meaningful; adding up the hours column is not.
• •On the worksheet, shift differentials sit in their own "Included in the pay above" box under each week, whether or not the week had jobs outside the shift. Each line reads "Includes Night differential" with its hours. These dollars are already inside the pay lines above, so never add them on top.
• •When a premium was earned on overtime, its line splits into regular, overtime and double-time hours, each with its own $/hr, because an overtime hour earns the premium at the overtime multiplier. A $5 night premium pays $7.50 on an overtime hour. The travel lines show their hours too, and the CSV carries the same split.
• •The "Check billing" preview on a job shows "W-2 staff: paid through payroll at their hourly wage" for a staff interpreter, instead of a per-job pay amount. Their shift differential is paid on the worksheet too.
• •When a pay period is reconciled, use the "Post period to QuickBooks" card on the worksheet to send payroll to QuickBooks (see the QuickBooks article).